Road Trips
Road trips are fun. They have to be because movies are made about road trips and movies just aren’t made about topics that aren’t fun, right? Right.
In reality, road trips are fun until you’re two days in and the ice is melted, you run out of snack food, the dog has thrown up twice, your butt is starting to go numb, and you can’t find a decent rest stop or gas station to pee at so you’ve resorted to thinking about peeing on the side of the road — or you actually do pee on the side of the road. Crude, I know.
But really, road trips are fun.
I’ve been going on road trips since I was young. I can’t even remember the first road trip I went on but it was certainly some trip with my mother. Mom and I always loaded up the car and went on trips together. Long trips, short trips, medium trips, trips in the truck, trips in the car, trips in the motorhome — at this point I have road trips mastered.
I’ve been on road trips with exes, boyfriends, best friends, ex-friends, current friends, Marine Corps friends, and groups of people I’m sure I’m forgetting about. I’ve smuggled a dapple-haired dachshund in a pillow case into an Orange County hotel at 2:00 a.m. because I refused to pay $50 per dog (and I had two). As soon as I got said smuggled pillow-case-dachshund in the hotel room she promptly poo’d on the carpet and fell asleep. Needless to say, I now try to plan out my hotel stays a little better on road trips.
One summer when I was about ten my Mom and I drove to visit family in Oregon traveling both ways up and down curvy coastal and mountainous highways. That’s when I discovered I got carsick. That was also the trip I learned that having a full bladder and being on a winding, twisty highway going as slow as possible to avoid suicidal deer in the dark was a terrible, terrible combination. Later that same summer we drove to southern California to visit my sister. I was so excited about that summer of trips I remember telling my Mom, “We will have driven the entire distance of the state [California] this summer!”
Road trips also call for a fair amount of quiet, observation, and thought. All of my road trips with my Mom brought new experiences. Time spent in the car is where I learned to be alone with my thoughts, appreciate the radio, scenery, and a good roadside rest. Unfortunately, it is not where I learned to read a map. Even after the Marine Corps put me through Land-Nav (navigation training) I still struggle with a map. That was typically Mom’s job. I started double checking my map reading skills after I convinced a good friend (the road trip driver of this particular trip) that we were, yes, on the correct highway and would intersect with Highway 76. When we ended up a parking lot of the Anza-Borrego State Park she vetoed my position as road trip map reader and I took over as driver.
A few years back Mom and I took a mini road trip from Oklahoma to Arkansas. As with most of our Mom and daughter road trips we were snacking on Diet Cokes and Cheetos (a must for Mom at about the mid-way point of the road trip) when we were tailgated going through a construction zone near the state border. As soon as we were clear of the construction zone and the highway was back to two lanes the obnoxious driver tailgating us whipped around, barely missing the back bumper of our vehicle. Mom was ready for him, though, and so was I. With Cheetos caked fingers (bag still in the other hand as she clutched the steering wheel) Mom sent the rude tailgater a bright orange “California hello!” before we both succumbed to laughter because I was also leaning over with my “one-fingered salute. Although the story is mostly a had-to-be-there road trip story it’s one of our favorites that we retell as often as we can. That and the time my dog Jill thought the Sinclair Gas station dinosaur in Wyoming was real and tried to break through my car’s window to attack Sinclair.
When was the last time you went on a road trip?
